Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party on March 11, 1985, just four hours after his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko died at 73. At 54, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo and the first Soviet leader who had come of age after Stalin. He understood that the Soviet economy was stagnating and that the political system needed reform to survive. His twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to modernize the Soviet system, not dismantle it. Glasnost lifted censorship and allowed public discussion of previously forbidden topics -- the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre, the reality of Stalinist repression. Perestroika introduced limited market mechanisms and loosened central economic control. Together, they unleashed forces Gorbachev could not control. Once Soviet citizens could speak freely about the system's failures, many concluded the system itself was the failure.

The clearest sign that the empire was cracking came from the Baltic states. On August 23, 1989 -- the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had consigned Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to Soviet control -- an estimated two million people joined hands to form a human chain stretching 675 kilometers across all three countries. The Baltic Way, as it became known, was an astonishing demonstration: peaceful, disciplined, and unmistakable in its meaning. Lithuania moved first, declaring independence on March 11, 1990, the first Soviet republic to do so. Moscow responded with an economic blockade. In January 1991, Soviet troops stormed the Vilnius TV Tower, killing fourteen unarmed civilians. Rather than crushing the independence movement, the violence accelerated it. Latvia erected barricades in Riga; six more people died in Soviet attacks. By September 1991, all three Baltic states had achieved international recognition of their sovereignty.

The Baltic states were not alone. Popular fronts and nationalist movements erupted across the Soviet Union through 1989 and 1990. In the Caucasus, Azerbaijan and Armenia were already fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh. Georgia's independence movement gained momentum after Soviet troops killed 21 protesters in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989. Moldova's Popular Front organized mass demonstrations. Ukraine's Rukh movement organized a 300-mile human chain linking Kiev, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk. In spring 1989, the first semi-free Soviet elections since 1917 produced the Congress of People's Deputies, and the live, uncensored television coverage of its debates -- where Communist leaders were publicly questioned and challenged -- electrified the country. Coal miners in the Kuzbass basin struck in July 1989, and the strikes spread to Ukraine's Donbas and northern Vorkuta. Gorbachev was losing control not through opposition but through the very openness he had championed.

On August 19, 1991, a group of Communist hardliners detained Gorbachev at his vacation dacha in Crimea and declared a state of emergency. The coup was meant to preserve the Soviet Union by force. It lasted three days. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building and rallied opposition. Troops refused to fire on civilians. The plotters lost their nerve. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but the power had shifted irreversibly to Yeltsin and the leaders of the individual republics. Over the next four months, republic after republic declared independence. On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine -- three of the Soviet Union's founding members -- signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring that the USSR "as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality" had ceased to exist. On December 21, eleven of the fifteen republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned. The next day, Declaration No. 142-N formally dissolved the Soviet Union.

The dissolution created fifteen independent states, released nationalist aspirations that had been suppressed for decades, and triggered economic upheaval across the former Soviet space. Russia inherited the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, UN Security Council seat, and most of its debts. The 1990s brought economic collapse, hyperinflation, and the rise of oligarchs who acquired state assets at fire-sale prices. Post-Soviet conflicts erupted in Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan, and Chechnya. The Baltic states pivoted toward Europe, eventually joining NATO and the European Union. Central Asian republics struggled with authoritarian succession. Annual polling by Russia's Levada Center has consistently shown that a majority of Russians -- often over 60 percent -- regret the Soviet Union's collapse, a sentiment driven less by ideology than by nostalgia for stability, predictability, and the sense of belonging to a great power. From the Kremlin's towers, the view is unchanged. But the country those towers once commanded is gone.